Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage

"A different married couple forms the focus of the book that won at March’s National Book Critics Circle awards : Jonny Steinberg’s account of the lives of Winnie and Nelson Mandela. It is, as Richard Stengel wrote in The Guardian , “a beautiful and sad portrait” of a “marriage of opposites” at the heart of the Black South African struggle. Winnie and Nelson “is more than a joint biography”: it’s a “deft and operatic interweaving of two outsized characters.” In Steinberg’s telling, “the pair are like twin planets that exert immense gravitational forces on each other.” They can pull each other off course: “Winnie was Nelson’s kryptonite; for her, he scrambled his moral compass and did things that were deeply out of character.” The author achieves incredible access to the inner workings of their relationship, thanks in part to the detailed transcripts prison guards took during Winnie’s visits to Nelson while he was imprisoned. That they exist at all offers some insight into the inhumanity of apartheid; the incredible cruelty suffered by Winnie and Nelson Mandela during their lives, drawn together in this impressive biography, offers yet more evidence."

"Winnie and Nelson is more than a dual biography. In his powerful book, Jonny Steinberg, a South African journalist, penetrates the mythology of the Mandelas’ fraught marriage to tell the story of apartheid. Steinberg writes a portrait of the Mandela marriage as a window to a country struggling to come to terms with itself. Both Nelson and Winnie Mandela were wounded souls, deeply scarred by apartheid, by the time they met at a bus stop in the Black township of Soweto. Social worker Winnie was just 20 years old, and Nelson was nearly two decades her senior, married, a father of small children, and was on trial for treason when they married 15 months later. During his nearly three decades of imprisonment, Winnie was allowed to visit only a few times, and she became more militant and prone to violence as Nelson became more conciliatory. The author of earlier books about South Africa and its transition to democracy, Steinberg shares with readers his discomfort in benefiting from transcripts of secretly taped, verbatim transcripts of Mandela’s conversations with his few visitors—Winnie, his children, and government officials, with whom he discussed secret matters—including one who stole the transcripts which eventually ended up in a private collection. Steinberg is empathic in his depictions of Winnie and Nelson Mandela, and it is painful to read about this deeply wounded couple, battling both the state and one each other. Ezra Pound famously observed that poetry is “news that stays news.” The same can be said for biography. These works of biography illustrate that the boundaries between history and news are porous, and that new evidence can be uncovered from both the best-known figures and the obscure."

"This is a hugely impressive book. It takes a very well-known subject—which has created stories of heroism and good triumphing over evil—and makes it much more complex. There is an intense evil in this book, which is the system of Apartheid which was the background against which the Mandelas had to live and exist. What Steinberg’s book so brilliantly shows is how the system damaged them. It made them both lesser people than they might have been. It brought out their worst features. Steinberg is also a wonderful myth-buster. Winnie and Nelson are heroic figures, but there’s a lot which is not at all heroic about them. It’s a ‘portrait of a marriage’, a very loaded phrase, because it’s warts and all. It’s warts which many historians had not talked or not known about, and previous biographers had left out (which just illustrates how biography is such a treacherous thing: it can be utterly misleading by omission). At the crudest level, we hear about the love affairs of both parties, the way in which they emotionally tried to cope against the crushing, evil machine that they were fighting. It’s both a history of South Africa with a freshness and a chilling detail that I hadn’t appreciated, but also makes one feel tremendously sorry for the two principal characters, in a Greek tragedy sort of way. Sometimes you’re just really cross with them. How could they end up doing such self-destructive things? In other words, the book brings the reader very close to two fascinating people who changed the world. Well, I’m sort of relieved that he isn’t, because it suggests that others can be like that. You don’t need to be utterly exceptional and a saint. He was exceptional, but you can go on having faults and still do wonderful things for the human race."